We tend to live disconnected from our essence and the environment that surrounds us. According to Eastern traditions, we live in Maya, a deformed reality that Valle Inclán called the grotesque and that modernity calls the Matrix. Our mind goes through states of confusion and dispersion in these times loaded with digital stimuli that take us out of the here and now, to take us to parallel universes. Every time, it becomes more difficult to keep your mind focused and be able to see what is happening.
Meditation is a very valuable tool to enter into a calmer perception of who we are at each moment. From it, we go inward, as the Buddha taught us, to recognize ourselves in our essential nature, with its lights and shadows. But meditating is not only that, but connecting the inside with the outside and vice versa. As the Hermetic tradition stated, the macrocosm and the microcosm touch each other. When you meditate, you break down the barriers and limitations that the ego builds, to merge with the field that surrounds you.
Nature is the universe or soul of the world that welcomes us. We are part of it and its elements are in our constitution. As human beings, we need to get in touch with nature and one of the best ways is by meditating in remote natural places. This is what both Taoist sages and Zen monks have always done. The basis of this practice is not the scientific study of nature but rather the ecosophical view. It doesn't matter why, but rather try to perceive and learn from the wisdom of nature. Keep quiet and listen.
Taoism teaches to connect with the indefinable natural order of the Tao. His knowledge is collected both in the Tao Te Ching and in The Book of Changes (I Ching). The tao is that which has no name, that which has always existed, the origin and the end of everything. When we meditate in the immensity of a natural space, in silence, in a static way, first we calm the waves of the mind, then we let ourselves be carried away by the senses, until we reach a space of fertile emptiness, where we perceive glimpses of the soul, beyond the reason. Then, we understand that we are not so important and that nature supports and teaches us.
The everyday neurosis finds peace in nature if we go to it through forest baths or sitting down to meditate, before the immensity of the sea or the grandeur of the mountains. The Chinese poet Li Po expresses it clearly, in his famous poem A Summer Day on the Mountain: “The mountain and I sit together, until only the mountain remains.”
The secret is being able to connect with the harmony and flow of nature. We resist accepting that everything is change, wanting to control an impermanent reality with a rigid mind. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus already warned: “We cannot bathe in the same river twice.” Meditating on nature involves learning these precepts, as well as honoring the sacredness of wild spaces that we have wanted to subdue. It is necessary to once again listen to the thunder as the voice of a god, see the tree as the root of a man or enter the deepest cave as if it were the lair of a demon. Carl Jung warned that scientific knowledge has isolated us from the cosmos and we no longer feel immersed in nature.
The wise Dersu Utzala (Kurosawa, 1971) remembered: “Fire is people, it screams. Water is also people. The water is alive. Fire is strong people and they get angry. “The water is scary when it gets angry and so is the wind.”
Meditating in nature is a good accessible to everyone. It is only necessary to enter a natural space in silence, in a respectful manner, lower the intensity of the mind and enter into communion with nature.
